advice to the school leaver

The New Year sees many thousands of young men and women joining the job queues. This is a time of hard competition for that choice slot on the short-list for the Career Job.

The chance of attaining a paying career that provides a lifetime of intellectual challenge or the opportunity to get amongst the BIG money early; the expensive drugs, the attractive companions, the foreign cars with faux-walnut dashboard fascias. Ivy Bar membership and quality sexual encounters in public places.

The career choices, as with the consequent diseases of both mind and body are innumerable.

Academia

So many years sitting on a hardbottomed chair in an airless room breathing in the dust of centuries issuing from a wall of ancient books that have a relatively meaningless content in the broader spectrum of modern life yet are required to be read and memorised line by line in order for the neophyte to claim ownership of a obscure degree which in all probability will condemn him to a life of penury and a dreary succession of bloodless relationships with men and women of a similar aptitude.

Accounting

The ability to make the result of simple addition densely complex is a highly valued skill as is the inability to clearly explain said result to either shareholders directors or surprise visitors from the Taxation Office. Accounting is a complex craft that easily befuddles a majority of the professional classes given that mathematical skills are never easily acquired and are rarely taught well in the classrooms of this great nation girt by sea.

The unwritten law of the Accounting profession is to steal for others and never yourself, though you should expect a commission from the transaction.

As Accountants are led into the dock they usually subscribe to the Shane Warne legal defense tactic in that whatever they are being arraigned for only qualified as being wrong the instant somebody found out about it.

Law

First, a helpful insight.

Law, generally speaking, can be separated into two distinct areas (1) Law by statute and (2) Law by precedent. Given this choice a potential entrant into the profession can consider whether he / she is a precedent person, i.e. do what everybody else has already done for many centuries – refer Academics and old books above – or go for the statute option. Remembering that statutes are in fact loosely gathered opinions ill considered, inexpertly debated, and eventually passed into law by the various Parliaments of the land purely to their own advantage and those to whom they are beholden (constituents excluded).

Parliaments that in the most part are either closed developers’ forums or open houses for the criminally insane.

The best quality a solicitor can bring to the Court of Law is the unarguable position that prevents his client from paying any penalty at all for the crime everybody knows he committed.

It should be noted here that Barristers are not really solicitors at all, as their main function is to tire the Bench’s concentration by talking non-stop for as many hours as it takes to induce stupefaction.

They also make good coffee. (A nod to young Michael)

Searching for a precedent

Journalism

The first of the ‘ ism’s.

Journalism is less a profession and more of a form of trench warfare where the journalist’s trench sits midway between that of the subject of his current blasphemous diatribe and that of his choleric sub-editor.

Journalism is by definition a form of professional and repetitive suicide, and unlike the optimists who promote Sikhism as a way forward, every reincarnation of the poor sod journalist is another poor sod journalist, and usually on the same flagship publication and the same rate of pay. Some despairing rag writers eventually retire to the semi-factual novel where they soon become close professional acquaintances of the chap mentioned in the paragraph directly preceding this one. Damages and personal vilification laws being as they are.